Characterizing and Modeling the Dynamics of Online Popularity.pdfVIP

week ending PRL 105, 158701 (2010) P H Y S I C A L R E V I E W L E T T E R S 8 OCTOBER 2010 Characterizing and Modeling the Dynamics of Online Popularity Jacob Ratkiewicz,1 Santo Fortunato,2 Alessandro Flammini,1 Filippo Menczer,1,2 and Alessandro Vespignani1,2 1School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47406, USA 2Complex Networks and Systems Lagrange Lab, Institute for Scientific Interchange, Torino, Italy (Received 15 May 2010; revised manuscript received 18 July 2010; published 8 October 2010) Online popularity has an enormous impact on opinions, culture, policy, and profits. We provide a quantitative, large scale, temporal analysis of the dynamics of online content popularity in two massive model systems: the Wikipedia and an entire country’s Web space. We find that the dynamics of popularity are characterized by bursts, displaying characteristic features of critical systems such as fat-tailed distributions of magnitude and interevent time. We propose a minimal model combining the classic preferential popularity increase mechanism with the occurrence of random popularity shifts due to exogenous factors. The model recovers the critical features observed in the empirical analysis of the systems analyzed here, highlighting the key factors needed in the description of popularity dynamics. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.158701 PACS numbers: 89.75.Hc, 89.20. a The dynamics of informa